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Bamboozled at the Revolution
The book is an inside tale told by an insider who chronicles the frantic days when the insiders were certain that the Internet was going to change everything. In this case, the insiders were the golden boys at media conglomerates who managed through some mixture of luck, devotion, and talent to control the worlds of cable television, newspapers, magazines, and movies. In the mid 1990's, the Internet threatened to overturn their world when they realized that anyone could set up a website, turn a bedroom into a corner office, and join the media. One minute some Mom in NJ is burning spaghetti sauce, the next minute Madonna is coming over for a chat on her weblog.
Reading the book is an ideal way for Slashdot readers to stick their nose into the exclusive tent filled with media moguls. The book does an ideal job of conveying the NY mindset that the world is made up of billions of sheep just waiting for the media to tell them how to bleat. When the Internet threatens to lure some of the flock, the big guys with the big corner offices start writing checks hoping to find a way to own a piece of it.
The book is played out chronologically and begins with Time-Warner's desire to build a full-service, interactive cable system in 1993. The final epilog was probably written in April and it's already a bit dated because it went to press before the accounting upheaval at AOL. In between, the executives of the big media companies struggle to find an Internet strategy-- something that never really gels for anyone.
Motavalli documents the progression with details that matter to media executives. We learn where people went to college (Haverford, Harvard), where they ate dinner (City Grill, "a gross strip mall" in Vienna, VA that serves great pizza,), the names of their yachts (Highlander), if their offices were big (yes), and if they got along (no). All of the executives in this book are always getting irked, losing confidence, chafing at some new org chart, or jettisoning some division.
Nothing seems to work for these guys. They try merging with each other; they try pop-up ads; and they try building portals. Yet through it all, the value of advertising just keeps dropping. The more time people spend on-line, the more page views they create. That means, more viewers mean lower ad prices. Uh-oh. The law of supply and demand seems to insist that success only begets failure. How are people going to make money on-line? We may never know, because nothing except the severance packages ever work out for the guys in the corner offices. The Internet won't be tamed.
To some extent, the title of the book is a misnomer. There aren't many stories of fast talking Internet guys pulling the wool over the eyes of the old media guys, at least in the way that Lyle Lanley talked the town of Springfield into building a monorail. The media moguls knew that the Internet was going to be big and they knew they only way they could be part of it was to invest. As Bob Pittman says at the beginning of the book, the networks ignored cable channels and then woke up one day to see that the upstarts controlled the new landscape. The old school media magnates knew they had no choice and they spent freely.
The title is also a bit wrong because the bamboozled are usually outright losers, conned completely -- and that certainly hasn't happened to all of the media titans. The list of the top news sites from Jupiter Media Metrix includes plenty of old corporate names . Despite the loss of cash, some of the old media companies were able to dominate the Internet. That doesn't mean they'll stay in the business and it doesn't mean that they're making money, but no one is worrying about the Mom in NJ.
This world view is a bit myopic. It should come as no surprise that web sites like the Drudge Report or Slashdot don't make it into the conversation. This is really a book about the few guys at the top of the New York media empires and their desire to somehow, some way, get a handle on this Internet thing. Truly interactive sites like Slashdot seem to be beyond the understanding of these guys because Motavalli notes that despite the "Letters to the Editors" section, most magazine and newspapers editors don't understand how to interact with readers.
The most telling details may be what didn't make the book. Motavalli spends little time talking about the words and images on the web pages. His subjects liked to use the word "content" as an abstraction for what the little guys serve to the little sheep. No one seemed to wonder whether it was good or bad, noir or funny, juvenile or sophisticated, or anything more than pure content. Aside from an occasional note about some truly lame web site, there's little discussion about what makes a web site good.
This is too bad because a few parts of the book hint that the guys below the big guys were really struggling to find the right voice for the on-line medium. They were asking questions like whether audience liked the ability to pick and choose the video snippets in the evening news. Was an on-line soap opera compelling enough to watch every day? Was there anyone who was willing to camp out by their keyboard to be the first to access some web site? Was buying an MP3 like buying a single or a full album? Did people want one portal or many?
As anyone who's posted to Slashdot in search of karma knows, finding a way to please the crowds is not an easy task. Every artist knows that after all of the hype, all of the press, and all of the marketing, a song, a book, an article, or a Slashdot comment needs to stand alone on the stage, if only for a brief second, and live or die on its merits. Motavalli's book best contribution may be showing us how little the media big wigs cared about these moments. It wasn't about the story or the presentation or even what the sheep seemed to like. It was all about the org chart.
Peter Wayner is a writer, consultant and media mogul himself. If you're one of the sheep reading this far, you might consider consuming his latest content on secure information handling ( Translucent Databases ) or his content on steganography ( Disappearing Cryptography). You can purchase Bamboozled from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
hmmm. I used to have the .sig "Offtopic == Moderator doesnt understand joke", linking to an "Offtopic" joke I had made. Methinks I need to reinstate it.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Funny and tragic :) My boss bought VA Linux at $100 a share.
There are two types of people; those who divide people into two types of people, and those who don't.
Sure, but Bill and Ted also gave the idea to Socrates. I mean sheesh...get your history right!